HYDERABAD: Hyderabad’s Prashanth Reddy, who intended to live abroad, came back to live with his parents when he saw how badly they needed care. This motivated him to start an organisation, Anvayaa Kin Care, to help more people like his parents.
“When I was living away from my parents, touring the globe to climb the professional ladder, I began to understand that my parents would do so much better with me around. This dawned on me around the same time I became a permanent resident of Canada — but I felt it right to leave it all behind me to be here with my parents, especially because I was their only child and no one would care for them better,” Prashanth shares.
But he didn’t stop at that — he got a couple of calls from people who stayed away to be of help to their parents and while he did all he could, he felt a lot more could and should have been done. “That’s when I did some research to find if there was a more professional, effective way of filling the gap and finally decided to create one — that’s how Anvayaa was born in 2016,” he adds.
Anvayaa is a one-stop solution for all senior care needs, right from 24/7 medical emergency support to simple things like taking them to the temple, getting a packet of milk delivered or even getting a plumber or carpenter to fix something at home. “Any help a senior citizen would probably need, we have it. We categorise them into health care, emergency care, leisure care and payment management, where we even take care of their bill payments so that their cash handling is minimised. We also have daily services that include everything needed for their daily living — just one call takes care of everything under our annual membership plans,” Prashanth tells CE.
Mentioning some of the roadblocks he had overcome, he says, “The biggest challenge was being the first in the country and that meant nobody knew that something like this is possible. We have a bigger challenge to spread awareness about our services. Next, while I wish taking care of the elderly must be free of cost, it’s practically not possible and people have slowly understood that. The continuous challenge is the pro-active care during emergencies — our team has been able to save 70 lives and we hope to do better.”
For now, Anvayaa has its operations in eight cities and will be launched in three others this month. About what’s next, he says, “We hope to expand to 20 cities in the next financial year and by 2025, we want to be present in 50 cities. We’re also working on a smartwatch for proactive services.”